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Show HN: Computable – Buy, sell, and redeem GPU for the exact weeks you want (getcomputable.com)

46 points by yuansong98 ↗ HN
Hey we are Computable. We spent years building trading infrastructure at Jump Trading and Coinbase. From that point of view, compute looks like energy markets before 2000: everything trades through private bilateral leases, there’s no visible price, and nothing can be resold. The same H100 rents at a 2x spread depending on who’s asking, and once you sign a 24-month lease, it can never change hands.

So we built a market for GPU nodes, sold by the calendar week. Here are three things you can do on it that you can’t do anywhere else:

- Buy exactly the weeks you need. Three nodes for the last two weeks of October means you pay for those two weeks and walk away when the run is done. You don't have to commit to 6-24 months, and there's no flexibility premium.

- Sell back what you don’t use. If your plans change, unused weeks turn back into cash: we keep a market quote posted on every position, so there’s always a price to hit.

- Buy (or sell) the future. Lock January in July at a price you set, so the cost of a future run is known before another 40% H100 rate jump makes it not.

The first auction is live now at https://market.getcomputable.com: a block of nodes, August through the end of January. Bidding closes July 31. The bids are sealed. You bid how many nodes, which weeks, and your price. Every clearing price gets published after settlement, because nobody knows what a GPU week is worth and we want the prints to exist in public.

Happy to go deep in the comments on anything, including the clearing mechanism, which is a packing problem and was fun to design!

18 comments

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paigexu522
Interesting approach. How do you ensure liquidity if buyers and sellers want different weeks? Is there a market maker, or is everything matched through the auction?
hazard
Didn't sfcompute launch with a vision of something like this and then cancel it because CFTC decided it was running an unregulated futures exchange? How are you getting around regulatory issues like this?
Lethalman
I need to login to see anything. I walk away.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
yuansong98
great feedback. we removed the login. feel free to check it out.
aubreyzhang
curious how you'd keep all parties winning at once on the platform (supply&demand& traders maybe?)

Are you planning to make money on float / spread / flat fee?

Retr0id
How do you prevent sellers from fraudulently selling future capacity they don't actually have?
zuzululu
how do you deal with data security
flowerbreeze
All the verifications without being able to see what it even does fully feels like pretty a big barrier, even more so than being login gated. Gives it a big banking/gambling vibe too.

Then again, I was only curious how it compares to other GPU rent options in general. Somebody going to bid on something right away might not care.

carterEthan
Interesting approach. Who do you see as the primary users—AI startups, researchers, or individual developers? How do you ensure GPU availability matches reservations?
yuansong98
all of them above. all availability either listed directly by or leased directly with providers so you should check them out!
rekpero
I work on a GPU cloud, so this is close to home. You mention “buy” and “sell,” - but from what I can tell the GPU node is effectively just being rented. What’s the practical difference here? Aside from price volatility, as a buyer, if I need GPU access I’d usually just go to a cloud or on-demand provider and rent a dedicated server for 1–2 weeks. What’s the real advantage of bidding and going through this process?

Also, can buyers choose the hardware location they want? And once the auction ends, how are shipping and the other operational details handled?